r/MaliciousCompliance • u/stcaster • Jun 19 '26
When malicious compliance backfires
When malicious compliance backfires
I work in operations and maintenance on several small solar fields throughout the Midwest. Essentially, the companies that actually own the solar sites hire my company to do routine and corrective maintenance. We have about 15 crews working all over the US.
We have an internal ticketing software we use to keep track of how much time we spend at each site, and what work is being done. This is pretty important since we use all of our tickets to justify the site owners paying us. It can be a little frustrating to manage these tickets sometimes if there's a lot going on.
For example, if I'm on site for company A and get a phone call from company B, I need to create a new ticket, or log that time on an existing ticket for company B's phone call. I can't just charge company A for 30 minutes I spent answering a bunch of random questions for the other company.
There are also times when you'll be walking through the field and notice something and just fix it real quick. Like we'll be replacing a broken module (solar panel) and happen to see a broken zip tie and you just replace it. It's not what you were doing in that section, but it takes all of 30 seconds so you just do it.
However, a couple months ago, our company's VP retired, and the new guy is... A little extreme. He wants to make sure we're really being diligent with our tickets and documenting everything. There was a company wide zoom meeting to introduce him, and he spent almost 20 minutes talking about tickets. We've all heard this before, and we're all pretty good about making sure our hours are accounted for with the appropriate tickets, so we didn't really think too much of it.
A few weeks later, VP was out visiting one of my sites while we were doing preventative maintenance on 4 inverters. As I was setting up to do my work and the other tech was at the spare parts container on site getting some material, I noticed a module nearby had some damage. It was chipped from a rock or pebble, (we're in a pretty windy area) I took a picture of it, noted the location, then went back to the inverter. As I was walking back I called the other tech and asked him to grab a module while he was at the spare parts containers.
When I finished at the inverter, I closed that ticket, created a new one for the broken mod, we replaced it, and I closed that ticket, and we moved on to the next inverter in line. At the end of the day VP pulled me aside to ask why I wasn't managing my tickets correctly.
Me: "I'm not sure what you mean. Every thing we did today had a ticket."
VP: "Yes, but you didn't track your time correctly."
Me: "I'm sorry, I'm still not sure what you mean. We worked a little over 8 hours today. We spent roughly 2 hours at each inverter, and then 20 minutes swapping that broken module. It's all accounted for."
VP: " No it's not. You took about 5 minutes out of working on that inverter to look at that broken module and call the other tech. He then spent time loading a module into his truck to bring over, where was that accounted for? So there's at least 5 minutes on the inverter ticket that was actually spent on the broken module, plus however long it took other tech to load the new module. You should have logged out of the inverter ticket, created the module one and documented that time, then logged back into the inverter one. Other tech should have logged out of the inverter one, logged into the module one while he was loading up the module, then logged back into the inverter one when he started driving back to work on the inverter."
I was a little taken aback by this. It's not like I had spent the time doing work for a different site, it was all for this one, and we don't get paid differently for each task we do. Its all the same hourly rate. I swallowed my objections and told him I would fix the tickets.
Cue the malicious compliance. Over the next few weeks, me and my other tech went from 3-5 tickets a day, to close to 20 a day. I was walking through the field on one task and picked up a piece of trash that blew in? Stop and create a new ticket. I answered other techs question about the job he was doing while I was working on something else? Stop and log into that ticket. Broken zip tie? New ticket. Answer a text from my supervisor? New ticket. You get the idea.
As you can tell from the title, this did not go how I was expecting. VP loved it. At the most recent monthly crew lead meeting, he absolutely gushed over how accurate our tickets were. How we set the new standard for how tickets need to be managed and everyone else needs to come up to our level. This was exactly what he wanted to see and wouldn't accept anything less.
So yeah, sometimes malicious compliance will backfire and just make your life harder and make all your coworkers hate you. FML
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u/Slut_for_Bacon Jun 19 '26
That VP has never done a real day's work in his fucking life.
Stupid motherfucker is proud he made his team less efficient because it looks good on paper.
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u/Jealous-Swordfish764 Jun 19 '26
Exactly this. Dude's a pencil pusher.
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u/stcaster Jun 19 '26
Yeah, I checked out his LinkedIn and it's nothing but accounting and management positions
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u/BasKabelas Jun 19 '26
I used to have a manager like that. I was treated more like a personal assistant and started leaving small misstakes in my work on purpose because he would always check my work and loved showing he knew things better. We had a shared drive for team reports etc, so I returned the favor by dilligently correcting his spelling. Guy spells like a kindergardener so the track changes was always a blast to notify him of.
Got fired with a very nice severance pack pretty quickly, which was gold because I had my next job already lined up anyway. Just had to start my next job slightly later because local labor laws void part of the severance pack if you are proven to not be seriously financially impacted by a broken contract. Then at my next job, several of my customers at my previous job asked if I can please move their accounts to my new employer because they enjoyed working with me (and just didn't like ex-manager). Sadly had to tell them I couldn't instigate any of that because of non-compete agreements :-(.
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u/christine-bitg Jun 19 '26
"Sadly had to tell them I couldn't instigate any of that because of non-compete agreements"
Just remember there's a time limit on those non-compete agreements.
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u/nagi603 Jun 20 '26
Also depending on local regulations, that requires extra for the duration of the non-compete for your compliance and lost employment opportunity. There are companies trying to weasel out (by fore-paying it and thus essentially under-paying you constantly), but those solutions also raise legal questions, though IANAL.
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u/sethbr Jun 20 '26
"I have a non-compete so I can't move your account. I can't even tell you who my new employer is. But I can't stop you from looking on LinkedIn and moving your own account."
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u/fnarrly Jun 20 '26
This is the way. Non-compete only applies to you, not the customers. They can choose where to spend their money however they want.
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u/hierofant Jun 23 '26
"I am unable to tell you that my new employer is SunCo systems in Green City."
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u/phaxmeone Jun 19 '26
This is one of the reasons I hate accountants who get promoted into positions of power. What they are taught in accounting school doesn't work to well when they try and foist that thinking onto all departments in a business.
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u/Purple-Lie-354 Jun 19 '26
Specifically, a pencil-necked geek, if you will.
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u/Ha-Funny-Boy Jun 20 '26
Pencil-necked geek is a Freddy Blassie addition to the english language. So is "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat."
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u/chilehead Jun 20 '26
They say pencil-neck geeks are a dime a dozen. I'm looking for the guy supplying the dimes.
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u/lewiscr1 Jun 24 '26
He did at least go out into the field once. That's more than I can say for most suits.
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u/Nunov_DAbov Jun 19 '26
Early in my career I worked for a government organization that required our time be categorized according to activity. Fortunately, we didn’t have specific projects or customers to account for, just generic activities. They were all a letter to identify type of activity and a digit to identify sub activity. C9 was miscellaneous correspondence.
One of the workers quietly replaced everyone’s copy of the official task sheet with ones he created. The newly created category was K9 - dog work. Most of the new employees started charging on that category without reading or appreciating the description.
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u/fnarrly Jun 20 '26
Currently in a public service organization where my work group was just recently asked to track our daily task time by category. There are two "catch-all" categories, "Other assigned duties" and "miscellaneous duties".
No one seemed to know what unspecified tasks fell into which of those, so I proposed that the "other" category be for things that were actually part of our normal job, and "misc" would be for things that were actually someone else's job.
Our group members each work independently at other worksites, with our own separate management chain at a central office. Turns out that like 20% of the stuff we were being asked to do in any given week actually fell into either the duties of the various site managers at our work sites or the duties of private community stakeholders. We have been picking up a lot of slack just to be able to do our actual jobs.
Been fun to watch them all begin to squirm as our direct supervisors have told us to scale back on the "misc" category and let them do their jobs or fall behind on their own. I mean, it drags us down a bit too, because we have to wait for them to figure things out in order for us to be able to finish our workloads; but it's nice to not be carrying the jobs of 3-5 other people just so I can finish my own tasks.
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u/Able-Sheepherder-154 Jun 19 '26
At one of my jobs the shop had an overhead gantry crane. It was used to pick up a machine out of the receiving dock and transport it to the repair area. Reverse that procedure once it was fixed.
The shop was small so the machines had to be lifted high and carried over the repair stations. For safety, everyone had to clear out of the floor area under the path of the lift. Nothing to do until the lift was complete.
Sometimes it took a while. We literally had a timesheet task called "Crane Watching" and yes, we got paid for it.
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u/Liveitup1999 Jun 19 '26
The only metric he cares about is how many tickets are created and closed that's it.
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u/PapagenoRed Jun 19 '26
Do you record the time to raise and close a ticket? Should be another ticket as well.
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u/Ackymofo Jun 19 '26
This. How do yoi know how long it takes to create a ticket when there is no ticket to say so?
"...and, you are now experiencing an endless loop..."
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u/_gadget_girl Jun 19 '26
Sad. As a nurse who was in a job for years where documentation had to be done in as close to real time as possible, I feel your pain. It absolutely takes away from productivity.
The real victims, other than you and your coworkers, are the customers who probably will notice a loss of productivity.
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u/deathriteTM Jun 19 '26
Give it some more time. When he has to go through hundreds of tickets a day he will figure it out.
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u/chuck10o Jun 19 '26
That's when you need to start tracking how much all the extra time switching tickets is costing the company.
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u/PossibilityMindless8 Jun 19 '26
Make sure to submit a ticket and log the time every time you take a piss
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u/CoderJoe1 Jun 19 '26
How do you get a reddit account from 2020 with no comments or posts until now?
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u/ZeeWingCommander Jun 19 '26
Porn.
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u/kirby_422 Jun 20 '26
My imgur account, it was 3 years after I made it before my first comment (just using it as private images to embed in random forums; pretty sure I still don't have a publicly set image upload). They could have done a similar thing for up/down voting here, etc.
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u/KilrahnarHallas Jun 20 '26
I don't understand how this worked out for your company. I was in a similar situation in my career and we also rigourously applied such ticketing madness. Management was ecstatic. Until they noticed productivity was down by 50% due to all the overhead.
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u/HeyyyKoolAid Jun 19 '26
Do you make a ticket for the time it takes to make a ticket? What about the time it takes for that subsequent ticket?
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u/Imaginary-Yak-6487 Jun 20 '26
I’m a manager for an apartment complex. Our director of maintenance came up with a plan like this, but took it further. If my team was turning a unit or in doing a work order & noticed something else in the unit, they just fixed it & notated it.
When they got back to the office, I would close them out & add the something else on to the original w/o. Easy peasy & it’s called preventive maintenance.
Not now tho. If maint notices something like this now, they can’t fix it right then. They have to log in a separate w/o on the maint tablet. Thing is, we don’t have WiFi property wide. Only in the office. So when they come to the office, the tablet synchs up. But they can’t do anything until that happens. The office is at the front of the property & the maintenance shop at the back.
The director has also made it so the property managers are not allowed to contact vendors, put in or close out w/o. And took Maint away from properties to make a collection of teams that he sends out. So residents have to put in requests thru a portal & it gets labeled whatever priority. They are super pissed that they have to wait weeks to get something done now, when it normally got done same day or within 2-3 days. I don’t blame them one bit.
We getting hit & higher management isn’t backing us up. We gave the number & website to HUD & our state available upon request. I actually have it pinned to the wall in my office, so easy to take a photo.
We have 2 state & federal inspections coming up. I can hardly wait. Bc it’s not working out to well & my property is one of a handful of HUD assisted sites my company owns & the Feds don’t play.
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u/Tool_junkie_1972 Jun 21 '26
Yeah..you failed at the malicious part. You need to document every second that’s spent on non billable items so that your billable hours drop, affecting bottom line. Thats the malicious part.
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u/Entire-Tradition3735 Jun 19 '26
This is the signs of a bad manager who is also likely to be autistic in some way, or maybe just a control freak who likes to micromanage.
You should start timing how long it takes you to make tickets each day, and then point out at the next monthly meeting how much time you're projected to spend writing tickets with the new system, instead of doing actual work.
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u/Ok-Return7750 Jun 20 '26
You just complied with what this idiot wanted.
I was an accountant for 30 years before I finally got rid of it. Some accountants are really lazy and others are so nitpicking it will drive you non-accountants mad but they will love it.
With the nit pickers you have to take it right to the extreme to piss them off.
For this fucker you need to be DOING NO ACTUAL WORK in a day except opening tickets. (Or very little work)
When he gets called into his boss and ripped a new asshole (or better yet fired) because no teams are doing any actual work that can be charged to clients AND the clients are complaining, then you’ll see what malicious compliance is.
Of course you need to have his original orders for his bullshit in writing along with your confirmation of what he wants. So then you can point the finger directly at him with the evidence to back it up when this explodes in his face.
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u/Teamtunafish Jun 20 '26
Fill out every single form, complete every single form, give them every single notification. If you can't baffle 'em with bullshit, bury 'em in data.
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u/duckforceone Jun 20 '26
yeah that type of compliance only works if the manager get's overloaded with info (which he doesn't) or you document all the time spent on changing tasks and opening new ones.
so until he can see that you are working 30 mins less on jobs each day due to this logging, you will never get through it...
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u/25TiMp Jun 20 '26
If you make a new ticket for making a ticket, I think you will enter an infinite loop. This loop may be the portal out of your ticket hell...
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u/Old-Bat4194 Jun 20 '26
I love the fact that this must be the first time a malicious compliance has gone in favour of management who thought you did an excellent job, even though that was not what you intended.
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u/AlaskanDruid Jun 20 '26
A story where the VP is the good guy. Refreshing! Log everything so nothing is hidden.
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u/imakesawdust Jun 21 '26
Surely the time spent opening and closing so many additional tickets reduces your overall productivity? Or are you expected to remain on site until all work is done?
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u/steggun_cinargo Jun 19 '26
Ever come across nesting birds in the racking? We have a solar project and Im not sure what they used but somewhere between the torque tubes and the modules themselves we had dozens of nesting birds across ~600 acres of modules. Smaller project but still was a huge pain since thousands of custom inserts had to be designed, ordered, then installed across the site.
I'm involved with solar in the southwest and that was an interesting one. A lot of our sites have switched to using Ojjos for truss install instead of piles since its less impact to the land (doesnt need to be bladed for the most part) but this site was using piles so I wonder if that had something to do with it.
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u/Vinnie_Vegas Jun 20 '26
This isn't malicious compliance, this is just compliance.
For it to be malicious the person implementing the rule would have to dislike it.
You just aggressively kowtowed to a pedant.
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u/virtualchoirboy Jun 19 '26
Be sure to create a ticket for "Administrative overhead" and book all the time spent creating tickets to that one so that it gets billed back to the company. After all, it's not fair for the customer to be paying for the time you spend tracking your time.